The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

Monday morning saw the familiar rush, laden with bags and not quite on time, which has characterised one week of every month for me for quite some time now. Of course, there are only a few more DAI weeks left before graduation, and I am beginning to wonder if I will miss this little exodus to the East. It delivers quite a lot of stress and requires more organising than I am really capable of, but it does of course bring in a bit of excitement.

Meetings, meetings, lectures, and the rest were on the cards this week. After last month’s freezing experience in the Balengebouw, and the complaints which resulted from this, we were thankfully back at the DAI for dinner and evening lectures this time.

We had a long and useful discussion on Thursday about our proposed participation in the Kunstvlaai in May. This got a bit heated at times, since what the DAI appears to want is to use it solely as an opportunity to promote the forthcoming book about Here As The Centre Of The World, which we the students felt (if I may say so) to be perhaps a bit exploitative and cynical; we are artists not salesmen. Hopefully this will be resolved in an amicable way.

Apart from that, a few evenings of course staying up late in the Bolwerk and Old Dutch (two of Enschede’s favourite bars with the DAI students), and on Friday the second of the four performance workshops begun last month. This one was lots of fun, with plenty running around pretending to be drunk/in love/tired/cold etc, naturally a bit embarrassing at first but less so as the afternoon wore on. Very nice, but exhausting, and I was glad to get on the train on Friday evening and make it back to my own bed and the chance to sleep until noon the next day.

I have been informed that I have not been posting so many pictures as previously, so here are a few of us acting; I can’t remember what we are supposed to be right at this point.

Oh, and I almost forgot – a strange thing happened on Friday morning. I was the last to get up at the DAI house, and when I made it down to the front door it turned out that it was locked. I didn’t have a key, and didn’t feel like calling up anyone at the DAI and waiting half an hour for them to get back, and so I decided on the (for me) logical option; I jumped out of the window. Not just like that, from one floor up, but first onto the little piece of roof above the front door and then down the pole of a handy street sign commando-style and onto the street below. What was strange was that several people passed by on the street as I was doing this, and not one so much as appeared to notice what was going on.